Welcome to The Daedalus Project

The Daedalus Project was a long-running survey study of MMO players. It is currently in hibernation mode. There will no longer be updated findings or surveys, but all information accumulated will remain available and comments will remain open.

For New Visitors: Check out The Daedalus Gateway for brief thematic primers to the data that has accumulated here over the past few years. Also look at the tag cloud to get a sense of what issues I have written about.

For Returning Visitors: The easiest way to scan through or find past articles of interest is through the "by Issue" or "by Category" listing pages. This link is also always available on the right-hand navigation bar.

For Students and Researchers: If you're looking for papers or articles in print you can cite, check out this index of peer-reviewed papers. If you would like some of this survey data to play with for a stats course, see this shared data set.

My New Book is Out!

The Proteus Paradox: How Online Games and Virtual Worlds Change Us--And How They Don't

This book challenges the myths around who plays online games and what really happens in these virtual worlds. We often think of online games as being about fantasy, freedom, and fun, but many gamers describe their gaming as a second job, superstitions flourish, and a player's suspected offline ethnicity can be a matter of virtual life and death. Moreover, virtual worlds contain a host of unique psychological tools for controlling how we think and behave. Drawing from player narratives, psychology lab experiments, and analysis of game server data, this is a book about gnomes falling in love, superstitious pigeons, how a community changes when computer city guards give out directions, and ultimately, what it means to be human in a digital world.

Hibernation

After 10 years of doing surveys of online gamers and 6 years of running the Daedalus Project, I am putting the project into hibernation mode. I'd like to thank every MMO player who has participated in my surveys over the past decade.

The Unbearable Likeness of Being

What does it mean to be embodied in a virtual world? Does virtuality make it easier to create new worlds or has it instead made it easier to emphasize material needs and artifacts? This is a somewhat non-linear reflection of virtual bodies that also traces out how I've encountered and thought about the issue of embodiment over the past 10 years since I first began doing research in virtual worlds.

Data on Player Life-Cycles

In an earlier issue, I used open-ended responses to trace out a player life-cycle model. In this issue, we'll fill in that framework with some quantitative data to see how demographics and player motivations fit into the life-cycle model.

Content Types

It's no longer sufficient to divide content into solo PvE, PvP, and raid PvE. There are many niches within these categories, such as PvP duels, BGs, and RvR within the PvP umbrella. Here, we'll take a look at data into how these many niche content types appeal to players.